I have never been happy with my Canon 17-35mm wide angle zoom lens since I purchased it in 2000. With a few real estate projects coming my way, I decided to move on and get a 14mm off-brand lens (Samyang). The Canon should fetch just enough cash for it to be an (almost) even swap.

When I was researching the new lens at the B&H site, quite a few reviewers mentioned using it for astrophotography. What the heck, I haven't tried star trails for 20 years since I had a medium-format film camera. That required keeping the shutter open for hours and it produced unsatisfying results shooting north through lights of Boston.

The process this time was to make about 300 30-second exposures and combine them in Photoshop. There is a little bit of glow from Billings, but it's not too bad. The work flow is a fairly straightforward process but takes time because it requires a lot of computing power. The first night, I got decent results but wanted to try again. Posted here is the result from the second night, and a single frame from that 300-image composite that shows some airplane lights at left and bottom, and a satellite flare at right.

The third night, I pointed the camera west toward the mountain instead of south, and got a different effect. But with the wide angle it was almost hard to see a mountain there. The fourth night I switched to my medium zoom lens set at 35mm and got the third image below. I also tried another series of 99 exposures the same night with the lens at 105mm, but was not happy with the result.

I took the images each night with the 6D Mark II, and it is limited to 30-second exposures. It also can be set on either 1-99 or unlimited exposures. I would like to use the 5D Mark III and take about 150 1- to 2-minute exposures, but it doesn't have an intervalometer. I ordered a gizmo from Amazon to accomplish that. When that arrives, I will make a few more attempts.

Although there are plenty of precautionary statements on the internet about attempting star trails when there is a bright moon, I think it would be good to have some moonlight on the mountain slope so it isn't just a dark gray hole. The new gizmo will give me control of exposure time and end time, so I can start around midnight and automatically shut off at 3:00, for example. Also, if I'm running in the middle of the night rather than starting at 9:30 as I have been, perhaps there will be fewer headlights and airplane tracks to edit out. The third photo is a composite of 325 images. I had to edit 59 of those images to take out headlights and airplane tracks, and I didn't get everything.

Looking west

Single frame

300 stacked frames